Heaven's Reach (43 page)

“Let it be
Wuphon's Dream
,” she assents, making it unanimous.

Gillian Baskin waits by the hatch for me to hand over the copy disk from my autoscribe. So I must now finish dictating this entry—as unpolished and abrupt as it is.

If this is where my story ends, dear reader, it means
Streaker
somehow made it, and we didn't. I have no complaints or regrets. Just remember us, if it pleases you to do so.

Thanks, Dr. Baskin. Thanks for the adventure and everything.

Good luck.

And good-bye.

Harry

S
OMETHING WAS TERRIBLY FAMILIAR ABOUT
this region of E Space, ever since he first stared across the prairie of twisted, fuzzy growths toward narrow spires that climbed to meet a vast, overhanging plane. The back of Harry's neck kept
tickling
unpleasantly—the way a neo-chimpanzee experiences déjà vu.

Now he regarded the same scene from another
vertiginous angle, as his scout vessel clung to a gigantic sheer cliff amid a blurry haze. Innumerable reddish blotchy patterns repeated symmetrically across the smooth vertical surface, like footprints left by an army of splayfooted monsters.

“Well,” he commented, his voice scratchy with surprise. “I never did
this
before. Who'd've thought the rules here would let a big machine climb straight up, like a spider on a w—”

Harry stopped. Realization left him mute as his jaw opened and closed.

It can't be!

He stared at the cliff's repetitious markings, then the distant spires, nearly lost in shrouding mist. A mental shift of scale made it all clear.

I … would've sussed it earlier, but for the blurry vision in this crazy place.

He felt cosmically stupid. Harry moaned aloud.

“By Cheetah's beard an' Tarzan's hernia … it's a
room.
A room in somebody's goddam house!”

Awareness lent focus to his tardy perception.

The prairie of fuzzy growths?

Carpet!

The tall, narrow spires?

Furniture legs. And that huge flat plane I fell from before must be a table.

The blotchy pattern on this “cliff” was probably
wallpaper
, or some tasteless counterpart. From this close, he had no clue if the motif was Earthling or alien.

This zone of E Space has so few visitors, it was probably in a raw, unmanifested state when I dropped in. The whole megillah may have coalesced around some image from my own subconscious mind!

He had been thinking about the station format, equipped with long legs from his last mission, comparing it to a spider. Perhaps that thought helped precipitate this eerily personal subcosmos.

Unless I'm actually dreaming it all, and my body's really lying in crumpled delirium somewhere, smashed under tons of debris where the station fell, an instant after I arrived.

Either way, it showed just why most sophonts thought this part of E Space especially dangerous.

Perhaps this was how insects saw things inside a house—everything a blur. Harry wondered if there were pictures on the walls, a bowl of fruit on the table, and a humongous kitten purring on some sofa, just across the way.

Maybe it was better not to know, or force E Space to reify too much.

Just one thing spoiled the impression of a quaint, gigantic drawing room—the
Avenue
—a slender, sinuous tube of radiance that emerged from the misty distance, wound its way across the floor, then pierced the wall below Harry's vantage point. A place called Reality, dominated by matter and rigid physical laws.

“I sense vibrations approaching,”
the station announced.
“From the point of connection-rupture.”

In other words, from the mouse hole where the Avenue plunged toward another zone of E Space. Three interlopers had taken that route before, leaving distinct traces. A small vessel squeezed through first, about a year ago … followed by a pursuer who carelessly blasted a wider path. Both left spoor signs of oxy-life. A third, more recent craft, shed mixed clues before entering the narrow route.

Now something was coming the other way.

Harry checked the station's weaponry console and found several panels lit up … meaning they were able to function here, though in what fashion remained to be seen.

“Let's see if we can try that other trick again,” he murmured.

Taking manual control, he sealed the station's reality anchor to the adjacent wall with an audible “thunk.” Then, nervously, he detached each clinging foot from the wall, until his vessel dangled high above the ground. “Lower away!” he said, causing the cord to stretch, halting just two ship lengths above where carpet met wall. The Avenue lay just a little to his left.

Whatever's coming out … it can't be much bigger than this station. And most starships that visit E Space
aren't well designed for it. I've got advantages, including surprise.

It seemed logical. Harry almost had himself convinced.

But logic was a fickle friend, even back in his home universe. In E Space, it was just one of many games you could play with symbols and ideas.

One of many ways to fool yourself.

“Here it comes!”
announced pilot mode, as something began nosing out of the dark tunnel.

It looked pathetic—absurdly long and barely narrow enough to fit through the tunnel. The intruder comprised a chain of hinged segments carried on stiff, articulated legs. It scuttled out of the dark passageway rapidly, then swerved aside, crouching along the wall as tremors ran from section to section. Watching from above, Harry's impression was of something wounded and frightened, cowering as it tried to catch its breath.

He did not have to engage observer mode to know at once, this entity was a machine. Its rigid formality of movement was a dead giveaway. More significant was the fact that it did not
change
very easily. Upon entering a new region of E Space, any other kind of life-form would already have flexed and throbbed through some sort of transition, adjusting its self-conception, its
gestalt
, to suit the new environment.

In this realm, believing often made things so.

Yet, by their very natures, machines were supreme manifestations of applied physical law. Consistency was a source of their power, back in Reality. But here it had crippling effects. Faced with an imperative need to adjust its form, a machine could only do so by carefully evaluating the new circumstances, coming up with a design, then implementing each change according to a plan.

Zooming in with a handheld telescope, Harry saw the mech's body swarm with smaller motile objects—repair and maintenance drones—laboring frantically to alter its shape and function by cutting, moving, and reattaching
hunks of real matter. In the process, bits and pieces kept falling off, crumbling or dissolving into big strands of carpet. Harry's atom sensor showed a veritable cloud of particles billowing outward … debris that would start attracting scavenging memes before long.

Clearly, this thing had once been a spacefaring device, a dweller in deep vacuum and darkness. It was amazing the machine could adapt to this environment at all.

A sensor flashed anomaly readings. Some of the pollution consisted of oxygen, nitrogen, and complex organic compounds—telltale signs of quite another order of life.

Wait a minute.

Harry had already been suspicious. Now he felt sure.

This was the third entity he had been tracking.

“Must've bumped into something it disagreed with,” he surmised. “Something scary enough to make it run away.”

Pilot mode soon confirmed this.

“I am detecting more bogeys, approaching the rupture boundary from the other side, following this one at a rapid pace.”

Harry narrowed down the source of the abnormal gas emissions to a sealed swelling near the middle of the caterpillar-shaped machine.
A habitat.
A container for atmosphere and other life-support needs. Some glassy shimmers might be windows, though the interior was too dim to see anything.

Clearly the machine knew time was short. Reconfiguration work accelerated, but little drones broke down from the frantic pace, overheating and tumbling to the carpet, which began waving toward the commotion, showing unnerving signs of animate hunger. Atoms were rare in E Space, and did not last long. Many simple meme creatures found bits of matter useful as trace nutrients, lending a bit of reality to living abstractions.

“Thirty duras until arrival of the newcomers,”
confirmed pilot mode.

Though its work was unfinished, the
caterpillar-machine decided there was no more time to spare, and began hurrying away next to the glowing Avenue.

I wonder why it doesn't try a dive back into normal space by jumping into the Avenue. Sure, it might emerge almost anywhere, and need centuries to find its way to a decent hyperspatial shunt, but don't machines have plenty of time?

He could think of several possibilities.

Perhaps it's too badly damaged to survive reentry.

Or maybe its organic cargo can't afford to spend centuries drifting through space.

The awkward machine suffered dire problems. Metal-hinged legs began freezing in place, or snapping and falling off. Harry pictured a wounded animal, struggling on with its last strength.

He turned to watch for the pursuers. A burst of light heralded their emergence, shining from the tunnel. Carpet strands quailed in response. Then the first creature appeared.

Harry's impression was of an armored earthworm, with a glistening head consisting of shiny plates. A beast of dark holes and airless depths. But this quickly changed. In a speedy metamorphosis, the entity adjusted to this different realm. Eyelike organs sprouted above, while pseudopods erupted below, until it stood gracefully atop myriad delicate tendrils, like a millipede.

Or megapede
, Harry decided.

Only one kind of creature could adjust so quickly in E Space. One that was native to it. A sophisticated meme-carnivore. An idea—perhaps
the
very idea—of predation.

As the first one transmuted to fit the ad hoc rules of a gigantic parlor room, several more crowded from behind, members of a hunting pack, eager for a final dash after their helpless prey.

It's none of my business
, Harry thought, pulling anxiously on both thumbs.
My first duty is to collect Wer'Q'quinn's instruments. My second is to track and deter interlopers … but the memes will take care of this one by themselves.

But Harry's indecision was stoked by a sudden
memory of the last time he had listened to the Skiano missionary preach its strange creed from a makeshift pulpit, beneath a slowly turning hologram of crucified Earth. With both light and sound, the evangelist sermonized that each sapient individual should look to the deliverance of his or her own soul.

“Although our sect has burst only recently upon the boulevards and byways of the Five Galaxies, we are already seen as a threat by the old faiths. They try to limit our message through regulations and legal harassment, using unscrupulous means to undermine our emissaries. Above all, they claim that we teach
selfishness.

“If the Abdicators, Awaiters, Transcenders, and other traditions agree on one thing, it is that salvation must be achieved by
species
and
clans
, perfecting themselves to follow our blessed Progenitors into the Embrace of Tides. Each generation should work selflessly to help their heirs move farther, step by step. How terrible, then, if individuals, in their trillions and quadrillions, start thinking of themselves! What if redemption could be achieved by each thinking being, through faith in a God who is above and beyond all known levels of universal reality?

“What if the Embrace of Tides might be
bypassed
, by achieving a heavenly afterlife, described in the sacred works of Terra? Would everyone then cease trying for racial progress? Abandoning posterity in favor of spiritual rewards
now?
”